Posts Tagged With: stuffed pork loin

My plan the other day was to drop by the grocery store and see what looked good for dinner. Sometimes this gives me an unexpected inspiration. Sometimes it does not. After perusing the butcher case for a bit, I settled on pork loin: dependably delicious. I toted my pork home and surveyed the fridge for stuffing options. As usual, I had sun-dried tomatoes, artichokes, and goat cheese on hand. And so I threw together a little Italian-style Stuffed BBQ Pork Loin.

My first surprise upon opening my pre-packaged pork loin was that it was not one 2.5-lb pork loin but two 1-1.5 lb tenderloins.

It made my knife work easier, since I just needed to carefully cut them through the middle almost to the other side, open them up like a book, and flatten them out with a mallet. (Pounding with a mallet is pretty primeval and very satisfying at the end of the day.)

Then I oh-so-carefully rolled them up and secured with butcher twine. Surprise number two was that I was almost out of butcher twine so these weren’t secured as much as usual. But it worked.

On they went to my Big Green Egg, which was set up for indirect heat (with drip pan underneath) and evened out at a toasty 375 degrees dome temperature. While the pork started cooking, I whipped up some easy Balsamic BBQ sauce. (Inspired by this one I used on some ah-mazing ribs not long ago.) I was feeling less ambitious so I just mixed a cup of bottled BBQ sauce with about 1/3 cup balsamic vinegar and threw in some onion powder for good measure.

After about 20 minutes, I (very carefully) flipped the pork loins over and started basting with the balsamic BBQ sauce.

Another twenty minutes, and they were flipped again and basted with sauce. At 50 total minutes of cooking, they were ready to take off and rest. I tented with foil and let them be while I dished up sides and fetched beverages. The first slice showed me perfectly cooked pork with a nice little smoke ring.

I plated up a few slices per person and they soon disappeared. Dependably delicious, indeed.

It seems that lately I have two main criteria when deciding what to cook: 1. Can I wrap it in bacon? and 2. Can I stuff a bunch of other tasty ingredients inside? My friend and colleague Shelley maintains that you can never have enough bacon and I tend to agree. So you will have to excuse the preponderance of bacon-wrapping because I’ve got another one for ya. One day when I was looking for feedback on Facebook re: what I should cook up, Jason over at Griffin’s Grub suggested “Butterfly pork loin, stuff with whatever and then roll up and wrap in bacon weave.” Sounded like a fine idea to me.

While at Whole Foods, I committed to a 3 lb pork loin and some apple cinnamon bacon. I already had some Hatch green chiles in the fridge (this is the season for Hatch green chiles here in Texas) and I decided to use those for the stuffing. A quick online search of “apple cinnamon Hatch chiles” yielded several pie recipes that sounded very intriguing. One had cheddar in the crust. Why not? I would add cheddar to the stuffing. Are you getting the feeling that I was improvising? Luckily, it all turned out well. Or, as my father-in-law said, “You should blog the heck out of that.” If you want to try it, then here’s the rundown…

Step one is to filet your pork loin — don’t worry, it’s really not hard. Think of it as cutting a big swirl through the meat. Here is a great demo so you can see it in action…

This is me fileting…

And the end result of my knife skills (plus a bit of tenderizing)…

Once you have it all nice and laid out, salt and pepper it and then prep your stuffing. Roasted green chiles are awesome and easy to use with just a few steps. Rinse them under water to remove most of the burnt skin.

Then cut off the stem ends, slice vertically, open up the pepper, and scrape out the seeds.

Once you have chopped up about two cups, throw them in a bowl. (Alternatively, you can use canned chopped green chiles and maybe mix with some sauteed onions.)

Then spread them over your pork loin, leaving a one-inch border. Sprinkle with some cheddar for good measure.

Roll that sucker up.

Ah, now comes the bacon. I really wanted to weave it up like Christine does over at Texana’s Kitchen but my bacon was too thick. So I decided to braid it. First, I laid down a bit of butcher twine vertically and then I put down the bacon…

I put the pork loin on top and started wrapping the bacon…

When I was finished, I tied up everything so it would hold together nicely.

I had some fire going in the Green Egg and managed to stick the temp at 350 degrees. Everything was set up for indirect heat with a drip pan underneath to catch the bacon drippings. On the grill went my lovely piece of pig.

After 45 minutes, I carefully flipped it over. Another hour and it was ready to remove from the grill.